Brothers!
It is hard to know where to start with this one. I started having painful contractions 3 weeks before William was born. They would range from a couple an hour to every 15 minutes for a couple hours. Then, they would just die out completely. After a week of that, I woke up one Saturday to contractions that got from 15 to 10 to 5 very quickly. We thought it was time to go to the hospital. They monitored me and I had contractions every 3 minutes in Triag. They addmited me being at 5cm and then after a few hours the contractions completely stopped again! I never thought that I would be one of "those people." Going to the hospital too early or having multiple "false alarms." I thought I knew my body well enough to know when I was going to into labor. I will never judge again! Little did I know it would be another 2 weeks of on and off contractions before the baby would arrive!
The day before I went into "real labor" I had an appointment with my midwife and I was still at 5 cm. We thought it was reasonable to sweep the membranes to try and help things along. I also went to the Chiropractor that afternoon to see if an adjustment would move things along as well. We bought some Castor Oil and that evening we walked the mall. At 3:30 in the morning I started getting intense contractions every 15 minutes apart. Didn't think to wake Byron since I have been going through that for the past 3 weeks. After I woke up around 7:30am and started moving around for the day contractions got closer together and were about every 5minutes. We decided to have my mom come to get Gideon and head to the hospital. After monitoring me at the hospital I was still at 5cm, but 100% efaced. Contractions slowed down to every 7minutes, but once I got in our room and got settled they increased to every 5minutes with increasing intensity. Unfortunately, after hours of this, I had not progressed in dialation. I was completely exhausted at this point and extremely frustrated. We had a talk with our midwife about our options and thought it would be a reasonable thing to break my water bag. This was not our ideal, but being an hour from home and 100% with regular contractions we felt it the best decision for our situation. After she broke my water, contractions got increasingly stronger and closer together. My poor husband's arms may have gotten bruised a little, but he was a trooper and huge support. I eventually started using the birth ball and that helped a little. I started feeling the need to push. I was SO happy to finally be at that point. I was terrified, but excited at the same time. I pushed for maybe 20 minutes and then our baby was born! Another boy! It was about an hour and a half after our midwife broke my water that the baby was in my arms!
I feel so blessed to have been able to have another natural birth (or as natural as it could have been with a minor intervention). The Good Lord has blessed us with two beautiful boys! We are just so happy and having fun figuring out how life works as a family of four.
William is such a relaxed baby compared to Gideon. He totally goes with the flow and tollerates all the hugs and kisses his brother loves to give him. Gideon is doing so well adjusting to the new baby and their our no big signs of jealousy-yet. He helps me throw away diapers, gets me burp cloths, and the like. I also wasn't sure how he would take to me nursing the baby, but he is just fine with it-and doesn't even seem to remember nursing himself just about 5 months ago.
Praising God daily for these two beautiful blessings in our lives.
